You’d think that with all the planning that goes into a new project — a feature film at that — filmmaker Taylor Toole might set aside his other work and focus on the task at hand. But fresh off a grand prize win for his 2009 feature Mow Crew at Connecticut’s Kent Film Festival, and a series of screenings at the Capawock Theatre of his recent short featuring Island skateboarder Nick Briggs, Mr. Toole has set to work organizing a casting call for a film he plans to shoot on-Island this summer.

The open casting call happens tomorrow at the Vineyard Playhouse from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. And he’s hoping for more success in finding actors than he did on the first time around; the last time he tried to ready the murder mystery for filming, he couldn’t find enough actors to fill the roles.

That was back in 2004, before Mow Crew delighted Vineyard audiences and made a name for Mr. Toole locally. He expects a better turnout tomorrow than he had six years ago, and has every intention of finally completing one of his earliest works.

The feature, Claire Pickett’s Kid, will be Mr. Toole’s fifth film project, but the story was inspired by the first script he ever wrote, as a student at Emerson College in Boston. He read an article about a group of pre-adolescent boys accused of murder, but brought to trial years later, after they had gone through puberty and grown up some. “I just thought it was interesting to do something at that period of your life when you feel like you’re invincible . . . and you don’t have an idea of what the consequences of your actions are. Having something really serious happen that could affect the rest of your life, at that point, when everything is really fluid,” he said in an interview this week.

Mr. Toole took inspiration from that story for his short script. “It was just the idea of this kid getting killed, and what led to it happening,” he said in an interview this week.

The story has evolved over the years, the script lengthened from its original dozen pages enough to fill a feature-length film. The story follows seven characters through an afternoon following a young man’s murder. “Each one of those vignettes has its own beginning, middle and end,” said Mr. Toole. And as the day unfolds, the mystery begins to unravel.

“It’s kind of dark, but it should be suspenseful — and fun,” he added.

The plot is a clear departure from that of Mow Crew, which focused on a Vineyard landscaper wrestling with the decision to leave the Island to pursue a musical career with his beloved. But both are character-driven and focus on the complexities of human relationships, Mr. Toole said. “I really like character relationships,” he said.

Mr. Toole was born and raised in Oak Bluffs, and went on to Emerson after graduating from the regional high school in 1997. From there, he went on to work in Los Angeles as a crew member for HBO’s Project Greenlight and a writer’s assistant for the series Deadwood.

Eventually, though, he realized the best move would be to venture out on his own. “I realized that I could work in the industry and try to work my way up, or I can just keep doing these films on my own,” he said. “That’s the route I’ve decided to take, because I have all the creative freedom in the world. It’s good because I’m getting better with each one. I feel like if I was just assisting somebody for 10 years, and I finally got my shot, I wouldn’t be a very good filmmaker.”

His independence also has opened doors for projects like After Work, a short film that followed Mr. Briggs as he skated through a typical day on the Island. The film was originally designed as a submission for a New York-based event that paired filmmakers with musicians to collaborate on a short silent film set to an original soundtrack.

The film came together quickly this winter, under a three-week deadline, with the help of Mr. Briggs and musician Bridget Barkan. And though Mr. Toole was mainly focused on plans for Claire Pickett’s Kid at the time, shooting After Work helped him get used to filming with a new camera. “It worked out really well,” he said. “Skateboarding sites have started to pick it up, so it’s kind of going viral a little bit, which is really cool.”

He said the Vineyard has been the perfect environment to grow his filmmaking career, and though an Island setting wasn’t essential for Claire Pickett’s Kid, he chose to come back anyway. “I feel like this is the place that I could come to and pull it off, because of the support that I’ve gotten on my previous projects,” he said.

“It’s a slow burn. It’s a hustle. It just doesn’t happen overnight,” he said of chipping away at a career in filmmaking.

But he’s gaining momentum. And if his career does take off, we can expect to see more of him.

“The [film] that I really hope to be able to do one day is Monster Shark Tournament,” he said, laughing. “It takes place during the monster shark tournament on Martha’s Vineyard, but fishermen start disappearing, and it’s like this crazy, big-budget action movie. It’s funny, [my films] fluctuate between being about murder, and being comedies. I like all kinds of genres, I guess.”